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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29894577">the value of a life</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nev_longbottom/pseuds/nev_longbottom'>nev_longbottom</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Bandom, My Chemical Romance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Monkey Paw energy, Wishes, if you could do it over would you</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2012-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2012-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 17:48:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,660</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29894577</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nev_longbottom/pseuds/nev_longbottom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A thousand and one bandom nights.</p><p>Bob Bryar looks for stories.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Two months after the accident, Bob signed an AMA form to the outrage of his doctors and called James Dewees to pick him up. “I’ll be hanging out by the E.R. entrance.  TMZ has been randomly appearing at the outpatient pick up zone,” James said, once he and Bob had finished discussing the important details. </p><p>Bob didn’t have much to gather. Nearly everything on the bus had been destroyed. The doctors had cut nearly everything else apart. His phone and wallet were mostly intact, only a small spiderweb crack in the corner of the screen.  He wasn’t too fussed about the clothes problem either. The casts were going to make wearing jeans impossible.</p><p>He needed help getting out of the bed into a wheelchair.  He started to fight for the right to push his own chair but the  stiffness in his wrists quieted his arguments.  He held his prescriptions in his hands as he waited, reading the fine print over and over to distract himself.</p><p>James pulled up a hour later, lowering the passenger window and letting out a whistle at the sight of Bob. “You know, for all your bitching on the phone, your eyepatch looks pretty cool.  Did they give you a prosthetic or is it just skin?” James tried to smile, but mostly he looked queasy.  The rings under his eyes were dark, but at least they weren’t red rimmed, like Lindsay or hiding behind sunglasses, like Alicia.</p><p>Bob rolled his eye and tried to pull himself into the passenger seat with one good heave.</p><p>“Dude,” James said in a scandalized tone, “you have like, five casts.  Don’t do that.”  He climbed out of the car and waved over one of the hospital aides to help out.  Bob was on enough painkillers that the jostling only made him grunt once.</p><p>Once situated, Bob buckled himself in and pulled the door shut with his good hand.  “Thanks, James.” He tried to say, I’ll heal quick, don’t worry about me, but he thinks about how close he’d feel if it were the other way around and he swallowed down the words.</p><p>James made a displeased sound, as he tried to situate the wheelchair in his trunk and then gave up, shoving it hazardously into the back on his car.</p><p>Bob watched the trees as they drove.  The ugly looks of spring branches, struggling to put out leaves.  </p><p>James made another stab at conversation when they pulled onto the freeway.  “We’ve got a couple options.  Nick Scimeca, he’s in Chicago, is a middle man for humans who want to buy boons from djinn.  Or we could go southwest, where there’s a college student who is on every psychic’s radar.  There are pretty clear signs that he’s changed the timeline but no one knows how he’s managed it.  Also in LA, there’s a witch who did a huge time working in the area. It’s almost definitely one of the Simpson girls who’s responsible for it.”</p><p>Bob nodded his head carefully.</p><p>“What about you-”</p><p> </p><p>James squeezed down on the steering wheel hard enough for his knuckles to whiten.  “No way in hell am I taking you to the sea witch, except as a last resort.  You do not want to pay that price,” he said.</p><p>Bob didn’t say anything else.  He was pretty sure it went without saying that Bob would be willing to pay the price.  It should be obvious, anyway.</p><p>“Scimeca first, then,” James mumbled and he took the exit west to Chicago. </p><p>***</p><p>They found Nick Scimeca on the fourth floor of a five story walk up, living in a rat trap apartment. He was rooming with a guitar player who, after taking one look at them, abandoned them at the door and locked himself in the bathroom.</p><p>In the doorway, Nick crossed his arms.  He had a thin face marked with laugh lines and his eyes hinted at the stresses in his life.  He wasn’t smiling.  “Two strangers meet at the crossroads,” he says. “One says Go first, stranger. Your water will soften the path.” He looked at both of them expectantly.</p><p>Bob nearly startled when James replied, “The second says, Go first, stranger. Your fire will light the way.”</p><p>Nick covered his eyes and sighs.  “I was hoping you guys were just insurance salesmen.  Come in. I’ll start the tea while you two start filling the blanks.  I think I have the jist from MTV News.” He went over to the water boiler in far corner of the living room and fussed with some metal tins stacked beside a dented teapot.</p><p>James and Bob made their way into the small living room.  The walls were covered in framed pictures.  Bob rolled his wheelchair closer to a book piled end table.  It was littered with used tissues and starburst wrappers.</p><p>Bob opened his mouth a couple times, trying to figure out where to begin. “I was the tie breaking vote.”</p><p>“I can talk if you don’t feel-” James tried to say but Bob cut him off.</p><p>“I was the tie breaking vote.  Not just that: I kept pushing, and pushing for us to just drop the Black Dragon album and then tour while we recorded Danger Days.  I kept insisting if Patrick could do it, we could do it.  So instead of staying in the studio, we rented a studio tour bus and took off. I was the catalyst.”</p><p>Nick turned around holding three tea cups by the handles with steady fingers.  He passed one to James and another to Bob before sitting down on a bean bag chair.  “Now, I’m not judging, but I need to know.” He said gently.  “Did you start the engine fire that killed your bandmates, driver and injured half a dozen others?”</p><p>If Bob hadn’t spent the last month fielding that exact same question from a slew of reporters, he would have been furious.  Time had worn him down.  “No,” he said.  “They confirmed it was a flaw in the recording equipment.  Electrical accident. No way I could have prevented it.”  Even repeating that still made him frustrated. He had been a tech for years. He could dismantle and assemble all the equipment the way that most trained infantry could strip glocks and .45’s.</p><p>Nick drained his tea cup before he responded.  “I can not help you, then.  The powers of djinn do not go so far as to change acts of chaos.  You must understand, though they are not human, they are not omnipotent either.  The djinn I work for are willing to undo the mistake made by individuals and only at a very high price.  If you had killed them by your own hand, I could do it, but this is too much.  You may leave now if you like.”</p><p>Bob reached down towards his wheel but James held out his hand to stop him.  “We understand.  Let us stay and drink another cup of tea,” said James, eyes glinting in the weak lamplight</p><p>The smile Nick gave in return was strong enough to make Bob shiver.  He got up and returned with the dented teapot, waiting until both Bob and James had drained their first cups before refilling them.</p><p>“I would like to tell you two a story if you are willing,” he said, grinning in a way that reached his eyes and turned them black.  It was unnatural, the first time Bob had seen someone tap that kind of magic without it being a party trick.</p><p>James nodded graciously and Bob jerked his head as well. That was all the encouragement Nick needed.</p><p>“There once was a young couple who wanted a child more than anything but complications from her surgery had led to her sterility.  They prayed thousands upon thousand upon millions of prayers for a child of their own, but complications with her paperwork prevented her from adoption, and a bureaucratic loophole prevented her from fostering.  They turned to the only hope they had left.  They folded a thousand paper cranes seven times. Each time they would finish one set they would tuck the wish into the wife’s womb to keep it safe.  Once she tucked away the seventh wish, she called out asking for a child of her own, offering to trade the wishes for a child.  </p><p>One day a djinn stepped forward offered to give her three children, each one a year apart so they could present the children as their own.  The first child was a tall, dark haired boy with his mother’s great luck and his father’s eyes.  The second child was a son with his father’s teeth and his mother’s heart.  The third was a girl with her father’s hair and her mother’s charisma.  What the couple did not know was that it formed these children out of the couple’s blood and their wishes, blood for their flesh and wishes for their souls.  With the four leftover wishes, he gave each child a curse gift.  Curse gifts are blessings that give as much pain as they do pleasure.  He gave the eldest knowledge, the middle child empathy, and the youngest compassion.</p><p>The djinn used the second wish to build himself a human form so that he might better enjoy observing his creations, who were bound to live lives of suffering.  He had expected that their gifts would lead to misery for themselves and their parents, but it turned out he was wrong. The djinn had not known that life itself is a curse gift that gives delight and despair in equal measure, as much as the universe can spare.  Though he had meant to entertain himself, twisting such a purehearted wish harmed only himself. The djinn was forced to experience all the curse gifts of mortality and he was cast out from his tribe.”  </p><p>When Nick leaned back at the end of the story, Bob was startled to notice that the moon had risen.  He hadn’t noticed the time at all.  “What happened to the kids?”</p><p>James shook his head, “That’s not how it works.  He told us a story. Now we have to tell a story of our own.  We can ask after the third cup of tea.”</p><p>Bob’s protest died in his throat.  He didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to do. James had the answers.</p><p>James drain his tea cup before he leaned forward.  He said, “There was a drunk driver.  You don’t expect a drunk driver at eleven in the morning, but there he was.  Driving on the road.  He didn’t even stop when he hit my son,  but he stopped at the stop sign.    Gillian watched it happen.  I was at the store.  The car was in the shop.  She left with him in the ambulance and called me from the hospital.  The doctors didn’t think he’d live through the night. When she told me this, I remembered a conversation with a friend who had sworn up and down that he had traded his fame to a seawitch to keep Bert and Jepha as his friends for the rest of his life.”</p><p>Bob nearly dropped his cup.</p><p> “At the time I had thought he was kidding but when I heard about my son, I called him right way and demanded to know where he found the seawitch.  We broke into the marina that night. We took his buddy’s boat out to the sand bars where he had been told to found the seawitch and sang the song to call the witch.  Turned out the witch was some scaly looking guy named Chad who said me that for something as valuable as my son’s life, I would have to pay with my happiness. I said yes of course and in the morning, I awoke to a world where my wife had divorced me, where I was in financial ruin and had to spend so much time travelling in a van that I barely saw my son one week a month.  But he was alive.  He was alive, whole, healthy and he hated me.  It was wonderful,” James looked worn at the end of his tale, and it was with a trembling hand that he held out his cup.  “May we share a third cup of tea?”</p><p>Nick tipped the bent kettle three more times. He waited until both James and Bob had sipped before he had a drink.  He then reached under one of the takeout boxes and sketched a simple map.  “To change something of this magnitude, you should talk to someone who has asked a favor of a local God.  The last man to do so and live is Brent Wilson.  He asked for the chance to go back and change his life.  He can point you to the next part of your journey.”</p><p>Bob shot back the last of his tea and headed for the door as fast as his hands could move him.  </p><p>“Wait, Mr. Bryar,”   Nick said softly.  </p><p>Bob stopped.  “The eldest boy from my tale went on to work for non-profit organizations.  The girl is a children’s advocate in her city.  You already know the tragedy of the second.  Pete Wentz is still programmed into your phone.”</p><p>Bob twisted his neck around as fast as he could and managed, “What are you talking about? Pete’s fine. He’s running around with some new project and it’s true he’s getting divorced, but that’s still better than-” Bob swallowed hard.  He didn’t want to dwell on what had happened to his band, not when there was still a chance he could fix it.</p><p>Nick laughed. He was still laughing when James and Bob let themselves out.</p><p>***</p><p>It took a couple weeks to drive from Chicago to Vegas.  The drive made Bob’s bones ache.  The dust clung everywhere.  Bob didn’t bother to shower. Welcome to America’s dustbowl.</p><p>***</p><p>They found Brent Wilson in a classroom by himself, playing scales on a piano with his shoulders slumped forwards and his mouth silently forming words.  He didn’t stop when they came in, but he did wrinkle his nose at the sight of them.</p><p>“I told Jeff I don’t want to transfer classes.  If I promise to  pay you by the end of the week, can I bribe you guys into telling him you couldn’t find me? Please?  I don’t care if no one else knows how to play an upright in the school. He knew Kelly was graduating. Fuck Jeff, seriously.”</p><p>James shook his head.  “We aren’t from the university.”</p><p>Brent squinted for a moment and then tilted his head, “Overdue library books? Aggie keeps swearing she’s gonna send mercenaries after me if I don’t return the Sandman comics.”</p><p> </p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Bill collectors.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Please don’t say you guys are huge fans,” he said glancing at James and Bob respectfully. “It’s been like a million years and I don’t even play bass anymore.”</p><p>Bob crossed his arms when James snorted.  “Dude, we didn’t even know you existed a month ago. We’re here because of the god.”</p><p>Brent stopped playing. Even his lungs seemed to still until he said, “Oh,” with a quick sigh that seemed to take all his energy with it.  “Is it time?” he asked.  “Coyote sent you for me?”</p><p>James and Bob looked at each other in confusion, “We came here to find out how you got a favor from a god,” James said.  “The djinn sent us.  Our friend are dead and we want to fix the moment that cause it.”</p><p>Brent relaxed and then gave them an apologetic look. “I can’t help you  there.  I didn’t ask for a favor.  I tricked him.</p><p>“You see, I used to be in this garage band. We wouldn’t have become popular at all if Ryan, our guitarist, hadn’t emailed our music to Pete Wentz. For some crazy reason the guy thought he should hear us in person. Spencer, our drummer, had something that he had to do that day, I don’t remember what, so it was me, Ryan and Brendon who played for him.  He thought we were awesome or something so he signed us.  </p><p>“Pete and I got along like a house on fire, man. We were tight.  I felt kinda bad ‘cause the dude was Ryan’s hero, but he was also the only friend I had who made time for me.  The guys in my band were cool and supportive and stuff, but like, Brendon would drop plans with me if Ryan or Spencer asked him to do something and I didn’t want to be lame, but it bugged me. Pete wasn’t like that. He was an awesome friend so we hung out a lot.  Brendon and Spencer were starting to figure out that they were on the same brainwave so they hung out a lot, too. We were all having so much fun being rockstars that we didn’t even notice how often Ryan would sneak off the buses to play in the wilderness with some dude who wasn’t even part of the tour.  He’d disappear for hours and then one day in Arizona, he didn’t come back. I went out to get Ryan but when I found him, he was with a coyote.  </p><p>“I told Ryan that Zack was gonna kill us if we didn’t get back but the coyote opened his mouth and said “No, Ryan isn’t going anywhere. I’m keeping him.”</p><p>“I nearly shit myself.  I thought I was crazy, but the coyote changed into mystery creeper guy right in front of me and told me he was going to keep Ryan. He thought Ryan was interesting and refreshing and a little weird but so was Coyote, so he really shouldn’t be throwing stones.  Grandma raised me right. I knew he shouldn’t keep anyone that didn’t want to stay so I pointed that out to Ryan, but that asshole told me he wanted to stay!  Since I had stolen Pete away and Spencer didn’t need him anymore, he wouldn’t leave Coyote’s side.  Ryan is such a bitch sometimes.</p><p>“Well, anyway, I knew I had to think fast or Mrs. Smith would Force choke everyone in our sleep.  So I told Coyote that Ryan was wrapped in a bunch of contracts with Pete that said he had to go finish the tour and make albums and stuff, but if he sent me back in time, I could change the contract so he could have Ryan all to himself sooner, but that I’d only do it for two favors. One for changing the tour contract and another for the record contract.  Coyote that that was a fair deal, so he sent me back in time.</p><p>“He sent me back to the day of the signing. I made sure I didn’t show up so we wouldn’t get signed, only we still got signed and Ryan got to have his hero all to himself.  Only, when we started touring, I knew I had to do something crazy to keep Ryan from doing something stupid in Arizona.  So I showed up late, did everything I could to get us fired or kicked off the tour and when that didn’t work, I quit.  </p><p>“Sure enough, Ryan was so busy scrambling for a bassist and bonding with Brendon and Spence that when Coyote showed up, he called him a creepy pedo to his face and told the guy to fuck off.  At least, that’s what Coyote told me when he tracked me down in Palo Alto.  </p><p>“I pointed out that I had upheld my part of the bargain. I had changed the album deal by not showing up, so there was a three album deal instead of a two album deal, and that I broke the tour contract by disappearing.  So he still owed me two favors.  He couldn’t seek out my death or destruction in any way and he had to leave Ryan alone.  He thought that the whole situation was so funny and ridiculous, and myself so ridiculous, that he wanted to keep me instead of Ryan.  His decision was this: I had five years from our meeting to see the world on my own and then he’d be coming to collect me, his new mortal sidekick.</p><p>“Only trouble is, he never specified if it was five years from when he sent me back in time or five years from the last time I saw him.  I’ve been waiting for him to show up and drag me off to be Pancho Villa ever since.</p><p>You might have a shot if you see the witch in Los Angeles?  Ashlee Simpson? She’s also a popstar,” he added apologetically.  “But I heard about the time she helped a kid who had been cursed at his christening.  She like, networked and persuaded someone into fixing it so a whole ton of people didn’t die.  You want her.”</p><p>***</p><p>Bob watched the ocean on the last leg of their trip.  He watched the waves and wondered  if they shouldn’t have started with the seawitch.  </p><p>James tried kill the boredom by turning on the radio, but every hour a Black Dragon Fighting Society song would play.  It didn’t take long before they started hating the radio.  The wheelchair creaked a little louder each rest stop.  A little more accusatory each time.</p><p>***</p><p>Ashlee wouldn’t let them in at first.  “Pete doesn’t live here anymore.  Give me one good reason to buzz you in.”</p><p>Bob hit the wall with his good arm, “Damnit, Simpson, my band is dead and everyone seems to agree that you’re the only person who knows how to fucking fix this.  You gonna help out me or not?”</p><p>The intercom disconnected, but the gates swung open.</p><p>James pushed Bob’s wheelchair while Bob shook out his bruised knuckles.</p><p>Ashlee met them at the door with bags under her eyes.  “We’re talking in the dining room.  I need to watch Bronx in the backyard. I don’t trust the nanny to do it.”</p><p>She waited until James was sitting down before she opened a wallsafe and pulled out a manila envelope.  “Here.  This is all my research.  I made some corrections in the margins after.  If you’re really trying to resurrect your band, do not let them convince you they need an equal amount of lives in payment. It’s bullshit. Resurrection might be that expensive, but time travel is a cheap and a viable option.”</p><p>James opened the folder and flinched.  Bob leaned over. The first page was a crumbling yellow parchment, torn along one side like it had been pulled from a book.  HOW TO SUMMON A CROSSROADS DEMON was printed neatly across the top.</p><p>“I’m a witch. It’s a family hobby that I like to keep up with, but I let some of the stuff slide after I met Pete.  I figured I could handle anything as long as he was with me.  Of course, when I finally do get around to doing a tarot reading, it’s nothing but tragedy.  I tried every kind of Fortune Reading method I could find and everything said the same thing about Bronx. He’s soulless.  A side effect of his father..”</p><p>I tried all kinds of healing spells, protective spells, everything I could think of without cluing him in on his ticking time bomb but none of it worked.  None of the readings changed.    That’s when I went to the crossroad and I traded my happiness so Bronx could have my soul.”  She watched Bronx outside as she talked.  </p><p>“Peter doesn’t know.I can’t be the person who tell him about this.”</p><p>“No,” she said quietly to herself.  “No, he’d just blame himself and do something drastic..” She paused and added,” I used to love dogs before I met hellhounds.  I used to love Rigby.”</p><p>They left her sitting alone at the table, watching Bronx through the window.</p><p>***</p><p>They didn’t have to discuss anything.  James drove straight towards the Atlantic ocean  The nights went by slowly, with them trading their favorite tour stories back and forth.  They reached the marina after a month of driving.  James was exhausted from being the sole driver.  Bob’s bones ached from the shortcuts and sideroads they had taken.  They eased the car as far onto the pier as they dared and James called Brandon, who sang the summoning song from speaker phone.</p><p>The person who bobbed out of the water looked like any normal, beachloving teenager. The only difference she was topless and her arms had tiny scales in place of freckles.  “Chad’s on vacation. I’m Charlotte. I’m filling in for him.  How can I help you? -  Not you,” she said looking at James.  “One merwish per customer.”</p><p>Bob rolled himself a little closer to the edge.  “Four of my friends are dead because I talked them onto the bus that killed them.  I made the decision that led to their death.  I need to go back iin time to fix it.”</p><p>Charlotte smiled.  “Oh, altruistic time travel! I love those.  A four person resurrection would be really expensive, but we have a set price for altruistic time travel.”</p><p>Bob sighed, “Let me guess. You want my soul.”</p><p>She recoiled, her tail making the ocean tides ripple.  “Too cheap.  The price is your happiness.”</p><p>Bob didn’t so much as look in James’ direction.  “Done.  Take it. You can have it.”</p><p>“Just shake my hand.” She swam a little closer to the pier, holding out her hand for Bob to shake.  Bob reached and squeezed.</p><p>The world went white.</p><p>***</p><p>Bob woke up in a strange room.  It was full of his belongings, but it didn’t look familiar.  His legs weren’t in casts, but he did have bracers on his wrists. He stumbled out the room and found himself in a cleaner, larger version of Nick Scimeca’s apartment.  The guy’s roommate, the one who had locked himself in the bathroom, was making waffles.  </p><p>Bob made a small confused noise and the roommate motioned for him to sit down.  “Hey there, Bob.  I’m De’Mar.  Before you run out the room, you should really have some waffles because you friends are all alive and perfectly fine.”</p><p>“What happened?”  Bob started to get up but De’Mar waved a little more firmly, and Bob found himself sitting back down.</p><p>“You left the band. It’s some kind of hush hush secret that no one is talking about, but when you left, the guys stayed in the studio for another year or so to make a whole new album with concept art and characters, and they’re having fun.  Charlotte’s really nice, so she used the loophole that your bandmates were dead, to refrain from resetting their memory when she reintroduced them to the timeline right after the you in this timeline quit the band.  She arranged it so that you were ‘touring’ and thus, out of touch for interviews or phone calls.  If you give your brain a few minutes to adjust, you’ll find that you remember everything.  Including getting Nick really drunk two months ago so you could get him to agree to let you rent the spare room.  That’s my doing. I didn’t want to see a nice guy like you homeless, kicked to the curb, a snack for demons.</p><p>“So now what?” Bob asked quietly.  He could feel the new memories shifting in their place.</p><p>De’Mar pushed a plate of waffles in front of Bob.  “Now you’re going to call that nice girl Ashlee and warn her that a year from now a crossroads demon will trick her into signing an invalid contract.  Because Pete’s soul is djinn, she couldn’t find him when she went looking for evidence of his living soul on her mortal plane.  If she had looked for his future on a slightly different plane, she would have seen Pete was going to live a long, happy life and die in his late nineties by laughing too hard at an episode of that 70’s show.  Her contract says that the demon will save him from the cancer he’s never going to get. I cleared that up a week ago but she hasn’t been answering calls from unknown numbers.  As for you-”</p><p>He  sat down at the table, with his features softening.  “You’ve developed serious problem with the nerves in your wrists.  All the repair work from your operation has degenerated. You will never drum professionally again.  Even in private, you won’t be able to drum without severe pain.  Your soulmate will settle for another perfectly nice person, so you will never know true love.  You’ll make enough money to make ends meet, and your retirement account will just barely cover the costs of your assisted care facility.  You will know inner peace, but you will never experience perfect happiness.  I’m sorry.”</p><p>Bob picked up his fork with a small smile and dug into his waffles.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. The Unfinished Sequel</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This is the unfinished start to the sequel of this fic.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A thousand miles away from Chicago, Ryan Ross stood at a carnival booth with his friends chattering around him.  “You know you’d love it,” Z said, smirk already making it’s way across her ace.  She tossed her hair to the side and leaned over the table in front of them, pressing twenty dollars to the counter top.  “Read Ryan’s palm.” She pushed Ryan to the edge of the table.</p><p>He laughed and tried not to wince when her shove made one of his hickeys bang against the table edge.</p><p>The girl at the booth, covered in gypsy clothes reached towards his hands only to stop when Tennessee and Jon both threw down more change.  “We would like to make sure you get the details.  Does he develop a hideous mole? A foot fetish? Cats?”  Tennessee’s eyes gleamed in the  lamplight.</p><p>Jon shrugged. “I just want to know if he has a hat fetish.  I already know about the foot fetish.”</p><p>Ryan snorted as the girl at the booth slowly raked in the money and  counted.  Her eyes went wide at the collection and she quietly cheeped, “Excuse me,” before heading into the back portion of the tent.  </p><p>A few minutes of jokes about Ryan’s future later and out came a younger girl, dressed in jeans and a Van Halen t-shirt that had seen better days.  She yanked her hair back into a messy ponytail and pulled into the seat, with the gypsy girl trailing behind her.</p><p>“You guys coughed up for the platinum package, and that’s me.”</p><p>Alex leaned over to Ryan and whispered, “She looks like she should be buying Justin Beiber tickets.”</p><p>From the vicious look the girl gave Nick, Ryan was pretty sure she heard that.  She put out her hand and gestured at Ryan’s hand until Ryan figured out what she was getting at. He held out both hands and she took them, pressing both flat against the table top and running her fingers over the lines.</p><p>“You’re right,” she says, eyes softening with an unspoken apology.  “This wasn’t supposed to be your life.”</p><p>Ryan stopped breathing for a second.</p><p>He hadn’t told anyone about the itching thought at the back of his mind that this wasn’t supposed to be his life.  As much as he loved consignment shops and the bright sun of the west coast, he wasn’t supposed to be here.  There were time with Z Berg, with Jon in the studio, with Tennessee at the soda shop and with Alex at the drive in that things felt right, but it was everything in between that felt wrong. Even now, he felt like there was something that needed...fixing..</p><p>She pointed her nail as a thick white line on his palm, cutting diagonally across his lines.  “This here is unnatural.  You don’t remember where this scar comes from.”  Ryan didn’t.  it had show up when he was seventeen and made him wonder if he was going mad.  </p><p>“It’s thickest at your love line here, and then cuts across like poison,  cutting at your lifeline, your heart line, it cuts right over the places where marks of happiness and success go.  It means you will never find the love of your life.   He or she has sold your love for goods or services.  They sold away your happiness and your chance of ever meeting them.  My apologies.”</p><p>Ryan yanked his hand back.  Jon pulled him away from the booth as Alex and Z started yelling at the girl inside.  </p><p>***</p><p>He told them he was going to the bathroom.  </p><p>The fortune teller’s tent was still open, only this time the young girl was waiting for him, her older sister at her side.  She raised her chin in the air, sneering.</p><p>“I told you, Gizzy. I told you he’d come back.”  She looked at Ryan with polite disinterest.  “He’s going to try and find his love.”</p><p>“Please?” he said.</p><p>“Two hundred and I will tell you what your love would have been.” She said, hands stretching out.  ‘ll take a check made out to cash.”</p><p>***</p><p>“You needed a place to stay during a film shoot.  Your friend, short - red hair - you asked to stay at his apartment. You wanted a break from your friends.</p><p>You met him there.  Tall, blond, a stoic resentful soul that caught your attention when you saw his markings.</p><p>You had to leave but you kept in touch, exchanging  correspondence.  The next time you met, it was at a friend’s birthday party.  Your friend was a childhood friend of your love’s friend.  You both began your relationship on this night.</p><p>You moved in together, you changed the shape of your music for him, and when everyone he knew died, you stood by him through surgery after surgery.  He left you, waiting outside his hospital room when he went out to change his life.  He never knew that you had been waiting beside him he entire time, waiting for him to love you.”</p><p>All that mattered to him was resurrecting the four people he loved more than anything in the world next to you.  If you want him back, you will have to find something to barter with and someone.”</p>
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